Dear Editor,
US President Barack Obama’s comment on the incident leading to the arrest and handcuffing of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates by a police sergeant in Cambridge, Massachusetts dominated the US TV networks last week and prompted an editorial in SN Saturday July 25, 2009 – Much ado about nothing. I also read the article by your Sunday columnist Wayne Brown, ‘What “post-racial” America?’
An interesting detail in Wayne Brown’s account caught my eye – that Gates was arrested and handcuffed “in full view of curious pedestrians.” Brown opined that the presence of witnesses might have saved Gates from a beating by the police.
I wondered whether the presence of onlookers might have caused the escalation in the first place. People do not like to be put down in front of others.
The others I am referring to include other junior policemen (including black policemen) in the party that went to investigate the suspected break in, plus the curious spectators.
The sequel, after Gates established that he owned the property, might have degenerated to one upmanship – the tired professor vs the police sergeant, each having a sense of his own importance.
The author George Orwell of Animal Farm fame wrote an essay based on his experience of shooting an elephant in colonial Burma where he served as a police officer. The elephant had run amok and trampled a native Burmese labourer to death. The elephant’s condition, however, was known to be temporary. Left alone the animal would have returned to sanity after a short while. A trained domesticated elephant was as valuable as a piece of machinery in the logging industry.
The following are excerpts from Orwell’s essay:-
“I had no intention of shooting the elephant… I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary…
“The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass and beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth. I looked at the sea of yellow faces [of the crowd] above the garish clothes – faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain the elephant was going to be shot… and suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it… Here I was, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece, but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib… He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all this way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
“But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me it would be murder to shoot him… alive, the elephant was worth at least one hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly…
“It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty five yards of the elephant and test his behaviour. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew I was going to do no such thing.”
Orwell did shoot the elephant. He concluded:
“And afterwards I was very glad the [Burmese labourer] had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient ‘pretext’ for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”
Orwell’s essay is required reading at a certain military academy for those who would be commanding others using modern weapons.
Yours faithfully,
Winston Moore